Fall 2009

Many and Many a Day

by Danny Nelson

Marley was dead.
She would call Jeff and let him know, Carol thought, her cold fingers snarled together. Marley’s death was a hard, impersonal fact stuck between her ribs like an arrowhead, and there was a weird comfort in the knowledge that Jeff would feel the knowledge in the same way, would let it sit like an irritating icicle just to the side of his sternum, would carry on and not care, a grim smile corkscrewing the sides of his mouth. It had been five years, shouldn’t their mouths look different at this point? Perhaps he had mellowed, perhaps his mouth did look different than hers and always had, perhaps she was hallucinating. She tried to conjure up an image of his mouth in its natural element and failed with a little hiccup of thought and body.

She was in the kitchen, making coffee, though all she had done so far was pull out the filters and separate them with futile, aggravated movements. Impetuously, she grasped the cool curve of Formica which lipped the counter, and wondered why she felt so hysterical. Marley had been a nuisance, a great yellowy mess of a mongrel that dripped drool on the floors and stank in the rain.

“A stupid dog,” muttered Carol, and it was true—Marley had a dim optimism about her, a blundering inability to comprehend the simplest commands. She had barked at the wind, tore up the new laurels by their roots, and had once mangled the neighbor’s pet rabbit into long strips of ragged red flesh. And now she was dead.

Carol closed her eyes, willed herself to check Marley off the internal list of things that she and Jeff had owned, things that she had been anxious to return. It all was equalizing, she thought. At last, it all was equalizing, and she should feel stable and kind and expansive. She could afford to be wistful. She could wipe misty tears away, talk about Christmas and lights and puppies and not feel foolish, not feel like her mother. She could mourn Marley properly, turn her into an interesting postscript of the e-mail she would write this year to her family: P.S. The dog died. She lived a good long life and she was suffering towards the end, so it’s probably best that she went quickly. I’m doing well.
The rough under-edge of the Formica bit into her palms. She pulled her hands away, cursing. Jeff had long fingers—when he made coffee he had to tuck his pinky and ring fingers in elegant curls under his hands or they would get in the way. When he forgot, which was often, the filters would flutter away from him like a preschooler’s snowflakes, the beans would spill in sandy avalanches off of the counter. And she, laughing, would pick it up for him. That was their pattern—she gathered up the things he dropped. Things like Marley. She began preparing the coffee—calm, her face severe.

P.S. The dog died.

They had picked her up from the pound as a joint Christmas gift, the first moment she knew they were really going to live together and that she wasn’t just another in a long line of girls that Jeff charmed into giving him closet space. “She’s our love-child!” he had said hilariously, and they had named her Marley because Bob Marley sang on the radio when they drove her home.

Marley liked Jeff better than her, Carol knew, but that was because Carol gave her everything she needed. Jeff was as mercurial as God, rough and playful one moment, brooding and irritable the next, and Marley had worshipped him accordingly. Jeff would feel it, too, Marley’s death. He would cry, he would reminisce. He would be as predictably unpredictable about Marley’s death as he had been about her life—and he would leave Marley’s death for Carol to deal with, just as he had done Marley’s life.

From the kitchen window she could see Roberto chopping at the frozen earth with a pick-axe, digging Marley’s grave. She was lucky she had Roberto, she thought, though his chin was a little soft and he laughed too late at the things she said. He made her warm, and the winter that had petrified Marley was a cold one. Roberto’s dark, solid frame drew out with each swing of the pick-axe, looking like a coffee taffy pull. He was enjoying the work of setting out Marley’s final resting place; he enjoyed doing things, and his periodic grimacing smile of exertion shone in the cemented gray of the frost-hard earth. He saw her looking at him and waved, and she beckoned him inside. The coffee was done.

He came in through the sliding door, steaming like a horse. Roberto always seemed to expand to the limit of his environment; in the warm light of the kitchen he looked burnished. “It’s cold out there,” he said in a liquid accent, blowing out his lips.

 “It’s December,” she said simply, handing him a mug of coffee.

“Last year it wasn’t this cold,” he said, meditatively sipping. “Last year it felt like—I don’t know, spring. There was lots of sun.”

They sat down at the dining room table, their eyes carefully trained just to the side of the other.

“I’ll need to call Jeff,” said Carol.

Roberto nodded, sipped.

“It was his dog, too,” she said, wondering why she felt the need to explain. “Well, sort of.”

Roberto spread his lips into something close to a smile. He wouldn’t talk to her about Jeff, wouldn’t mention his name. He was like Marley, she thought suddenly and with bone-sapping apathy: dim and optimistic. And she loved him in the same way she had loved Marley, practically and pessimistically. Still, it was a pity about his chin. Jeff had a long chin, slightly flat and lopped off at the end. Some years it had been furred with golden hair when he tried a beard, and he had looked as yellow as Marley. They had a picture somewhere of Marley and Jeff in Santa hats, the manes about their faces mingling, their smiles twin arcs. She bit her lip and drummed her fingers on the tabletop.

“This is really good coffee,” said Roberto. “Is there—is there peppermint in it?”

The phone jangled angrily in the kitchen, they both jumped.

“Who’s that?” asked Roberto. “I mean, it’s Christmas Eve. Who could be calling?”

“I don’t know.” The phone was suddenly, inexplicably, frightening to her. She rose and retrieved it, forcing herself to be brisk, forcing herself to be cheery. She punched the button and raised the headset to her ear. “Hello?”

“Carol? Is that you?” She had known, in an animal way, that it would be Jeff’s voice, but it still came as a shock, the warmth of it twisting the arrowhead inside of her.

“Jeff.”

“Carol! Thank God you picked up—I thought for sure you’d be out partying. I’ve been thinking about you. Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas,” she said evenly. There was something wrong with his voice. She pressed the receiver closer to her ear. “It’s good to hear from you.”

“God, it’s been—what, four years or something?”

“Five, I think. How have you been?”

“Great, great. I’m in St. Louis now—doing some advertising work.” He was drunk, that was the wrong thing, his voice sloppy. “It’s a great city but too hot, even now. I miss the snow.”

“Well—“ she waved her hand ineffectually at the window—“there’s no snow here, either.”

“You’re kidding! There should be, by now. It’s December!”

“Yes.”

Jeff coughed. “So…” There was noise in the background, rhythmic and insistent. He was at a party then, and drunk too. It tasted like the past, and she grimaced.

“Is Roberto still living with you?” Jeff asked.

She glanced at Roberto, who stiffened. “Yes, he’s here.”

“Oh, okay—right there?” said Jeff.

“Yeah.”

“Oh. I just kind of hoped—”

“Hoped what?” she said, turning away from Roberto, who stood up, his coffee neglected.

“Nothing, it’s not important,” mumbled Jeff. “I’ve just been thinking about you—and—”

There was real emotion in his voice, made blubbery with whatever he was drinking. “What, Jeff?”

“Will you tell Roberto something from me?”

Her breath felt caught somewhere in her throat, her body seemed locked in the indecision of whether to swallow or spit it out. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell him—” the party surged back into life behind him, he became lost in the noise. “What I want to say is, tell Roberto that I still love him more than anyone else in the world, and I always will.”

Her breath came out in a great gust. “The dog died,” she said, and hung up the phone.

It felt like a victory. She looked at Roberto to share it with him, but he was stepping back outside, to finish Marley’s grave before the darkness fell.